On Being Christian in Our Strange Secular, Neo-Pagan Society

In one of his many brilliant insights in Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton observed, “When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more widely, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

Chesterton has put his finger on what distinguishes the secular, neo-pagan society of today from the paganism of the pre-Christian West. Our society is secular because of a cultural bias against faith in God so that all of reality is interpreted without reference to God, and it is also neo-pagan because rejection of faith in God entails abandoning the distinctive Christian way of life and reverting as a matter of course to the old pagan vices. However, Christianity has left an indelible mark on the West which will not be erased. Because of the influence of the long centuries of Christendom, the West has been shaped by certain virtues which were successfully inculcated. Therefore, the mission-field faced by the church today constitutes a society where not only the vices “wander and do damage,” but also the virtues which were inculcated by Christianity “have gone mad.”

This is why the secular neo-pagan is both morally permissive and moralistically fanatical. Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood perceived the emergence of this new secular neo-paganism in The New Man For Our Time. While Trueblood’s thesis was that the church needs a wholistic emphasis on personal faith in action, he perceived the emergence of the new post-Christian activist. He observed, “By an activist is meant a person who holds that an attack on entrenched social evils is the only part of Christian life that is worth considering. The characteristic activist pickets, organizes marches, signs petitions, and engages in protests.” This kind of activism represents a “new morality” in which what counts is “concern for the poor” and other social concerns while marital infidelity, drunkenness and other personal moral failings are tolerated. Our society has moved beyond what Trueblood perceived when he wrote his book in 1969, but the trend of moral permissiveness combined with moralistic fanaticism was already established. This trend was a manifestation of the arrival of secular neo-paganism. In his 2007 book Tokens of Trust, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams observed, “One of the oddest things in our culture is that we seem to be tolerant of all sorts of behavior, yet are deeply unforgiving.” The moral code of people today is not simply a matter of moralistic fanaticism about certain social concerns alongside a morally permissive attitude toward personal behavior, but the paradox of permissiveness and fanaticism may be present in our attitude toward both social concerns and personal behavior. Williams observed how a moralistic fanaticism can be manifest in the way a “popular media mercilessly display the failings of politicians and celebrities.” It is truly odd how a popular media which promote every manner of baseness and moral permissiveness can, at the same time, be so selectively moralistic and condemning of particular moral failings of individuals. This moral confusion is the result of what Chesterton would describe as the “shattering” of Christendom by which both the vices and virtues have been set loose from their original setting in the wholistic Christian creed and life so that they “wander” and do much damage to persons and society. 

One way to understand the so-called “cancel culture” of 2021 which has no tolerance for freedom of thought and expression is that it is the product of a Christian influence that is cut away from its roots in a living Christian tradition. The virtue of, say, racial justice is cut loose from its Christian roots and allowed to wander and do harm. The important concern for racial justice becomes a fanatical crusade that overrides everything else because the old Christian tension between the “already” and the “not yet”–the awareness that we live in the interim between Christ’s coming to redeem and his coming again in the future to reign–is completely forgotten, and therefore there is the mad belief that we can establish a perfect society of absolute racial justice right now, and anything or anyone that stands in the way of this aim must be destroyed. Some commentators describe present “anti-racism” as Marxist; in so far as that may be the case, it is because Marxism preaches a heresy of Christian eschatolological hope in which the perfection of the future envisaged in the future coming of Christ is transposed to the present and understood as a possibility that can be accomplished by human beings without Christ. Moreover, there is no room for mutual forgiveness and reconciliation in this kind of fanaticism because the universal redemption accomplished by Christ is also forgotten with the consequence that even virtues become oppressive because they carry only the demands of the law rather than being rightly positioned as the fruit of new life engendered within the context of a gracious redemption made available by the Spirit.

These observations are worth mentioning and pondering only because they are helpful for the church in setting its sights on its mission field in the era of post-Christendom. The world Christians face is one which both does not believe and also believes too much. That is, it does not believe in the reality of the living God nor in the redemption of the Son of God, but it does believe in some of the virtues which faith in God and in his Son deposited in Western culture and, alas, does not understand that these virtues cannot be rightly understood nor realized without faith in God and in his Son.

Christianity is not preoccupied with a few abstract ideas or ideals, but it is a whole way of human flourishing made possible by faith in the grace of God through Jesus Christ. In contrast to a society that would turn every person into an ideologue and social activist, the church–when it is not accommodated to the world–celebrates ordinary life and aims to enrich it by its rituals and habits of being. While Christians truly care about alleviating poverty and racism, for instance, Christians also rejoice in the conception and birth of children, the daily joys of home, work and citizenship, friendly relations among neighbors, wholesome food and drink, and the uplift of gathering together for festive liturgy. C.S. Lewis was thinking of how Christianity cares about sustaining and sanctifying the ordinary life when he wrote in his essay “Membership,” “A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind–if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else–then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”

Can Christendom be revived? Can there be a renewal of a measure of Christian influence in Western culture? Only God knows.

In the meantime, the church has little choice except to realize that the old order of Christendom is over, and it must concentrate on being itself rather than playing the role of being the religion of the culture. The church must recover its identity and mission in the story of Israel and in its apostolic charter as set forth in the New Testament, e.g. 1 Peter 2:9-10. The church must become a healthy community which provides an alternative to the dissolution and derangement of the surrounding society and a refuge for those who seek healing from the toxins of secular neo-paganism. If a long-term period of being the church in the midst of a secular, neo-pagan society issues in a renewal of Christian influence in the West similar to the influence of the church in the Roman Empire following about three hundred years of Primitive Christianity, then this would probably mean an extension of the life of Western civilization. If not, then Christianity will have recovered its role of being the spiritual and moral “thermostat” of society rather than being merely the “thermometer” of society, as Martin Luther King, Jr. described it, and by the will of God it will remain to bear witness to whatever kind of civilization that will replace the West.